On a Sunday afternoon swim, a 6-year-old boy was bugging me in a sweet sort of way. He rode up and down the handrail on the stairs in the shallow end of the pool where I was trying to sit in peace. He was laughing and talking, but I couldn’t understand a word through the …

The Federal Reserve has grown the monetary base from $827 billion to $3.1 trillion in five years. At the same time banks have stuck $2 trillion more than required in reserves at the Fed. This money lays around fallow, earning just 25 basis points from the central bank. A blossoming to its full potential would …

Jim Rickards lit up the Agora Financial Investment Symposium in Vancouver telling the crowd the price of gold will soar north of $7,000 per ounce in an inevitable global currency reset, the fourth reset since the founding of the Federal Reserve. The first was in 1914, the second in 1939, and the third in 1971. …

A frightening story this week in The New Yorker tells of a Texas couple that headed toward the Texas-Louisiana border to buy a used car. They were carrying all their savings in cash. They were stopped by the police. The police found cash and a tiny pipe, and arrested them both. Then the police made …

From antiquity to the Middle Ages, public health meant two things: sanitation (mainly clean water supply and sewage disposal) and protection against epidemics. On sanitation, think about the elaborate aqueduct systems built by Roman engineers. Epidemics meant transmissions of communicable diseases. Attacking lifestyles deemed threatening was a preferred activity of public authorities, but public health …

New York seems to have more than its fair share of knuckleheads. Paul Krugman and Tom Friedman are both stalwart columnists in The New York Times. And there’s staff writer James Surowiecki at The New Yorker. More about that in a minute… First, investors are taking it easy… distracted by barbeques, family reunions, and the …

Government can control many things, but it can’t control our minds and, therefore, our economic decisions. This has been a major source of frustration for the last two presidents. In 2001, President Bush demanded that Americans immediately go out and spend, racking up more debt in the hopes of inspiring economic recovery. President Obama has …

In 1985, Irwin Schiff wrote in what has become a classic book, How an Economy Grows and Why It Doesn’t, a pictorial introduction to basic economics. Now his sons are taking up where he left off.

Edward Snowden is in big trouble for revealing that our government is doing to its own citizens what the U.S. once accused Russia of doing to its citizens. In what is really a bizarre turn of events, Russia has become a safe haven for an American whistle-blower.

A recent study on Canadian health care has been released late last year. In it, the authors examine the deleterious effects of socialized medicine on patient wait times and the delivery of care.

Japan’s “universal” health care system, like all such systems the world over, is in trouble, with costs rising and the population aging. Nearly 25% of Japanese are over the age of 60, a proportion expected to increase to 40% over the next 50 years. Since the old generally require more — and more expensive — …

I’ve just completed a heavy schedule of talks at the Agora Financial Investment Symposium in Vancouver. All my talks centered on information economics, Web startups, and the productivity of the Internet and its meaning. As usual, I learned as much from the attendees as (I hope) they learned from my talks. The research I did …

In recent months, the price of gold has tumbled. Along the way, lower gold prices have undermined the share price of many mining plays. The yellow metal is selling for its approximate cost of production at many of the world’s largest mines. Yet for all the gloom and doom within the gold investment space, there …

The stock market hovers around all-time highs, and right on cue, individual investors are starting to get back into stocks. They are tired of earning nothing in money market funds or bank CDs. Ben Bernanke’s zero rate siren song has enticed reticent investors ashore all in the name of stimulating the economy and putting people …

“One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!” — Winston Churchill It’s with the …

Every time you buy a drug at a pharmacy — be it by prescription or over the counter — there’s a middleman that makes a huge profit… And it doesn’t matter what pharmacy you go to, either. It could be Walgreens, Rite Aid or part of a larger, more integrated health care network… Regardless, the …

In the ancient world, when people got themselves into debt, they were often forced to sell their daughters into prostitution and their sons into slavery. More about that in a minute… First, a quick look at the financial markets. Looks like gold might have put in a bottom. We figured it would be around $1,100 …

“What are you complaining about all the time?” people sometimes ask me. “I’m just about as free as I want to be.” Here’s the problem. How can we really know what we want if we’ve never had it before? The less free we are, the less we know what freedom feels like and how it …

Back in 1972, when I was a 10-year-old technology and news geek in Chicagoland, a particular story grabbed my attention. Someone had planted time bombs in safe deposit boxes across the country. Their timing systems could be set up to seven months in advance — an impressive feat in 1971 — using common wireless electric …

That Edward Snowden has put the whole political, corporate, and governing class in a bind. With his revelations that a heretofore obscure agency has long been collecting all data on our digital lives, Snowden very plainly blew up the whole perception that government is somehow of, by, and for the people. The picture he paints …

Mohandas Gandhi, the greatest pacifist of the 20th century, is widely quoted as having said, “Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look back upon the Act depriving the whole nation of arms as the blackest.” Some have struggled to reconcile his pacifism with an opposition to disarmament. But there …

Like it or not, the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare, for short — is coming. Enrollment in state exchanges, online marketplaces for purchasing health coverage or applying for government-run programs, opens Oct. 1. Between now and then, governments across the land will blow millions of dollars in public relations campaigns to reach target audiences and …

Is there anything that we can do to stop the government’s data mining of our email, phone calls, and other digital habits? I moderated an entire panel on this subject during FreedomFest in Las Vegas last week. The room was packed from front to back, standing room only. Clearly, there is a great deal of …

Struggling savers, of which there are plenty here at FreedomFest, have been getting plenty of investment wisdom during this year’s largest gathering of free minds. However, there is no consensus as to what a person is to do.